Pollution linked to soaring obesity rates

A team of researchers has found a link between a type of pollutants and certain metabolic complications of obesity.

A study by the team of researchers at the IRCM in Montreal led by Remi Rabasa-Lhoret, in collaboration with Jerome Ruzzin from the University of Bergen in Norway, could eventually help improve the prevention, diagnosis, and treatment of cardiometabolic risk associated with obesity, such as diabetes, hypertension and cardiovascular disease.

Although obesity is strongly linked to insulin resistance and type 2 diabetes, a subset of obese individuals, termed "metabolically healthy but obese", appears relatively protected from the development of such cardiometabolic complications.

The researchers are studying the factors that seem to protect obese individuals who remain metabolically healthy, in an attempt to find therapeutic avenues to prevent complications for others who are at risk.

"Recently, persistent organic pollutants (POPs) have been found to accelerate the development of prediabetes and obesity in mice, thereby mimicking the unfavourable cardiometabolic profile characteristic of certain obese individuals," Rabasa-Lhoret said.

"As a result, the aim of our study was to test whether metabolically healthy but obese individuals have lower circulating levels of POPs than obese individuals with cardiometabolic complications," the researcher said.

It was found that close to 70 percent of the detectable POPs were significantly higher in individuals with cardiometabolic complications compared to metabolically healthy but obese subjects.

The study is published in the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism.